1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate to performing storage operations in a virtual environment and, in particular, to systems and methods for replicating data of one or more virtual machines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many companies take advantage of virtualization solutions to consolidate several specialized physical servers and workstations into fewer servers running virtual machines. Each of these virtual machines can be configured with its own set of virtual hardware, such as a processor, memory, ports, and the like. In particular, a virtualization layer, or hypervisor, allocates the computing resources of one or more host servers to the virtual machines and further provides for isolation between such virtual machines.
Associated with each virtual machine is at least one virtual machine disk located on a datastore. This virtual machine disk can be copied, moved, archived or the like, such that certain vendors offer solutions that replicate virtual machine disks from a source datastore to a destination datastore. However, disruptions to replications systems during copying generally require the rebuilding of an entire replicated disk, which can consume a significant amount of time and processing resources.